Since my life and career have been focused in the nonprofit sector, I sometimes forget that the investment of both financial and human capital are crucial for real economic change. Much of the climate action advocates have taken up the cause of disinvestment in fossil fuels. It’s also important to consider where it would be best to invest capital to meet the climate crisis challenge.
A New Venture Capital Fund to Address Climate Change
Stepchange is an early stage venture fund founded and led by Ben Eidelson (aka ‘Climate Papa’). It “invests in product-led companies that will make a step change impact on climate. Stepchange puts product leaders at the core of everything we do—from who we invest in and how we support them, to who we seek as LPs, partners, and advisors.”
Fund announcement – the press release includes contact information for prospective investors. This includes its first four publicly announced investments:
- Bayou Energy, a Seattle company accessing customer utility data to support clean energy installations
- Itselectric, a New York startup developing technology for installing public curbside EV chargers on private property
- Rhizome, a Washington, D.C., company working with electric utilities to boost grid resiliency using artificial intelligence
- Line.Build, a startup with Seattle-area connections building software to connect contractors with decarbonization incentives
- Podcast deep dive on the fund (or on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen to podcasts by searching for ‘Climate Papa’). Included in the podcast are interviews with the co-founders, and initial recipients of the fund’s investments. One of the fund’s co-investors, Aaref Hilaly Partner at Bain Capital Ventures (LP), said, “We’re thrilled and very excited for the future of Stepchange and grateful to be able to partner with you as an anchor LP in the fund, thought partner, and as a co-investor.”
The Stepchange venture fund is one of many funds that seek investors interested in halting climate change. I found this crowdsourced list at the Freeing Energy website: THE DEFINITIVE LIST OF CLEANTECH & CLIMATE TECH INVESTORS. I can’t vouch for its accuracy or integrity, but I think it is worth sharing. A word to the wise: Investors Beware! Do your due diligence before parting with your money.
Many nonprofit organizations and university research centers also have promising projects worth investment by government and individuals. Check out my Resources pages for more information.
Farming Up, Not Out
Solutions Journalism featured a story titled, “Automation is Transforming the World’s Leading Vertical Farm Companies.” It’s about technologies that hold the promise to transform agriculture into a more energy-efficient and productive sector.
“Automated indoor farming is the process of growing produce through new methods of technology such as controlled climate systems, vertical farming robotics and AI-powered software that have the potential to increase crop yield. These new methods have the potential to minimize the environmental impact of growing crops by limiting intensive water use and runoff waste.”
Grabbing carbon from thin air
Anthropocene’s newsletter offers a fascinating story about a new technology that could help capture the carbon we’ve already produced. Titled “Behold the THETA Cycle: A new way to turn E.coli into tiny factories that grab CO2 from thin air,” it describes the design of a synthetic biological process. This can create a pathway to convert CO2 into valuable industrial chemicals that is faster than the ways plants fix carbon. “Most carbon capture technologies are expensive…so scientists are looking at natural carbon-capture processes that could have a lower price tag.” Details about this research at the Max Planck Institute can be found in the journal Nature Catalysis. While it remains at the research stage, it holds promise as a future venture.
When Old Technology Works Best
Sometimes the old ways are the best, as a Washington Post Climate Solutions reporter discovered and explained in “Ancient Elements of Cool.” In the Egyptian village of New Gourna, he found housing that had been built to withstand brutal heat without electricity fueled air conditioning. “It was here that the Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy began a social housing experiment in 1945, planning a town with traditional Nubian materials and design, defended against the heat with thick walls of mud brick and natural ventilation — passive cooling techniques that had, for millennia, been an essential part of the local architecture.” The article’s author is architect critic Philip Kennicott. In old Cairo, Kennicott saw a mansion that had been converted into a museum. “Today, we could call the House of Suhaymi a well-insulated home with passive, downdraft cooling, complex solar shading and brise soleil, and it would probably get a gold rating according to the prevailing environmental design standards in developed countries (according to one academic study of its performance).”
Despite the efficiency and lower costs of such ancient technologies, they are ignored today, as Kennicott bemoans. “Architecture students who want to make buildings sensitive to climate change tend to look to modern, Westernized green building technologies rather than their own traditions, which is frustrating to architects and teachers like Khaled Tarabieh. ‘It is an architectural discourse problem,’ he (Tarabieh) said, a question of how countries like Egypt think about not just climate change but history and identity. ‘Where are we heading? Will we reinvent the past, living and learning from best practices?’”
Investing and Divesting
A recent newsletter from Climate Action California points out that investment in climate solutions is one approach to addressing our climate crisis. The other is divesting from fossil fuels. “According to the Global Fossil Fuel Divestment Commitments Database, over 1600 institutions (with over $40 trillion in investments) have made some form of commitment to divesting from fossil fuels. They include the University of California, ABP (Europe’s largest pension fund), the Vatican, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (the world’s biggest, which has divested from coal and upstream oil companies) as well as 12 major global cities.” Climate Action California has been urging CalPERS, the USA’s largest pension fund, to pull its money out of fossil fuels.
You can read more about divestment from fossil fuels at my October 14, 2023 blog post, “How to Disinvest in Fossil Fuels.”
Climate change politics
Since 2024 is an election year in the USA, I will occasionally add this feature to my posts to point out the importance of voting for – or against – candidates based on their positions on climate action. Today’s item about the USA Presidential race comes from the January 16th newsletter of Heather Cox Richardson.
“…a December 2023 CNN poll showed that 73% want the government to do more to address climate change. And yet, today, Scott Waldman of Politico previewed the Trump team’s preparation for ending all efforts to address climate change. Complaining that the people in Trump’s first administration were ‘weak,’ Trump advisor Steve Milloy told Waldman that ‘The approach is to go back to all-out fossil fuel production and sit on the EPA.’”
And there’s this item from the January 17th newsletter of Robert Hubbell:
“Convincing one person to vote is not easy, but neither is it impossible. Set that as a personal goal. Start now and give yourself nine months to convince someone to “get out to vote.” Our democracy may depend on personal actions taken by concerned citizens in the next few months. Be part of the solution!”
